Gallows Court (2018) by Martin Edwards

Martin Edwards is a British solicitor turned award-winning crime writer and anthologist who debuted with All the Lonely People (1991), introducing his first series-character Harry Devlin, but, over the past ten years, Edwards has been tirelessly championing the classics – assuming the role of Nestor of the Golden Age Renaissance. Edwards published well-timed genre studies, The Golden Age of Murder (2015) and The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (2017), right when the reprint renaissance gained some serious momentum. Serving as companion pieces and introductory guides to the swelling flood of reprints. Edwards has also been working overtime as he compiled over twenty anthologies, beginning with Capital Crimes (2015), published under the British Library Crime Classics banner. A noteworthy entry in the British Library anthology series is the locked room-themed Miraculous Mysteries (2017).

That's merely a small sampling of Edwards' contributions to the genre, classic and contemporary, but I've only read two of his short stories, "Waiting for Godstow" (2000) and "The House of the Red Candle" (2004), to date. So about time I tried one of his novels. Where better to begin than with the 1930s historical retro-GAD series Edwards created five years ago?

Gallows Court (2018) is the first of currently four novels in the Rachel Savernake series and had been warned that the novel is incredibly difficult to discuss and properly review. Holy shit, the reviews were not kidding! Gallows Court is an intricately-plotted, pulp-style thriller that can be best summed up as cloak-and-daggers in a dark labyrinth, surrounded by a dense hedge maze, rigged with traps, explosives and secret passageways – bodies around every corner the story takes. All the chaos and mayhem served one purpose: introducing and establishing the character of Rachel Savernake.

Rachel Savernake is the daughter of a wealthy and notorious hanging judge, "Savernake of the Scaffold, people called him," who was forced to retire after attempting to slash his wrists at the Old Bailey. So the old judge returned and Rachel returned to Savernake Hall, situated on an island called Gaunt, which is "as isolated as anywhere in the kingdom." Rachel spend her childhood in that lonely, isolated place with a demented father and some retainers reading every volume of criminal history in the judge's private library ("...no place for a child to grow up"). But when the old judge finally passed away, the now twenty-some Rachel returned to London as a fabulously rich woman while retaining her reclusive habits. She bought a mansion, rechristened Gaunt Hall, turned it into "a luxurious fortress" and generally shunned publicity. However, Rachel apparently has been playing amateur detective as she solved the Chorus Girl Murder and is currently on the trail of the Headless Torso Killer, but the murderers conveniently committed suicide. One took enough strychnine to put down a horse and the other swallowed a bullet inside a locked room.

Gallows Court makes it abundantly clear Rachel and her own faithful retainers had a hand in their suicides, but to what extend? You always have to take certain narrative tricks into consideration. The story is interspersed with old diary entries from Rachel's distant cousin, Juliet Brentano, who lived at Savernake Hall at the time of the Spanish flu pandemic and the diary entries do not paint a very flattering picture of the then 14-year-old Rachel – a child as "mad as the old brute who fathered her." Now she appears to be all tied in a spate of violent murders and dodgy suicides.

That unavoidably begins to attract unwanted attention. Firstly, there's the Clarion reporter, Jacob Flint, whose chief crime correspondent, Thomas Betts, was run over and is now on his death bed. Betts heard rumors of Rachel ferreting out the culprit behind the Chorus Girl Murder, but everyone refused to talk on the record. And then he got run over. So, recognizing a good story and wanting to tell Rachel's story, Flint dives head first into a very deep and dangerous rabbit hole, but realizes too late that everyone even remotely connected to the case has to fear for their lives. To say that there are a lot of murder would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that Gallows Court has the Paul Doherty amount of bodies. Flint does not emerge from his horrific ordeal entirely unscathed.

Now all of this still sounds relatively straightforward and comprehensible for a historical, pulp-style thriller, but the further the story progresses, the deeper it descends into pulp and thriller territory – really out there kind of pulp. Gallows Court reads like a modern descendant of the pulp-style mystery thrillers by John Russell Fearn (The Rattenbury Mystery, 1955) and Gerald Verner (They Walk in Darkness, 1947), but dialed all the way up. So with new plot developments, twists and turns every other chapter, the plot of Gallows Court is next to impossible to boil down. It's quite the journey. What can be said is mystery readers looking for a more traditionally treatment of the 1930s detective story will be disappointed as the story is essentially a thriller clad like a Golden Age detective, but it has a very good reason to take this route.

I noted earlier the plot serves to introduce and establish the character of Rachel Savernake, while peeling away the layers of her backstory. I think most people who read this blog can anticipate one of the main plot-twists concerning Rachel's character, but what counts is how it sets-up the series and the implications of Rachel appearing on the scene of an ordinary-looking murder. Rachel Savernake reminds me in that regard of younger version of Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley. You can draw a comparison between Rachel's debut and Mrs. Bradley's first appearance in Speedy Death (1929), but, like everything else in Gallows Court, the character of Rachel is dialed up to eleven. So its fortunate I listened to my inner voice of reason this time around and not immediately skipped to the third novel in the series (Blackstone Fell, 2022), because it has two impossible disappearances from a locked gatehouse and a clue-finder! So it was very tempting to start with the locked room title, but Gallows Court is clearly an essential piece needed to understand and fully appreciate what comes next. Look at me being chronological all of a sudden.

So while the thriller is not always the game I enjoy, I can enjoy a good, pulp-style thriller every now and then. Edwards wrote engrossing and absorbing historical thriller that keeps you turn the pages to see what's going to explode in your face next. Mortmain Hall (2020) and Blackstone Fell have been moved up the big pile. To be continued...